Gallery Artists

Taha Afshar

Taha
Afshar

Taha Afshar’s work captures the delicate
tension between the objective and the subjective, the particular and the
universal, the momentary and the timeless. For Afshar, the process of painting
seemingly operates as a form of meditation, where meaning is generated through
the durational practice of working itself. Finished images thus reflect the
thickness of human experience and sense perception, building layers of meaning
into a single unique scene.

Born in 1983, in Winchester, Taha studied Art
and History of Art at Winchester College,
where he was also award the Drew Scholarship. From a young age he exhibited in
local galleries and gained local awards. He graduated from UCL with a degree in Economics,
followed by a PhD. from the London School
of Economics. Through out this time painting has evolved through various
styles of portraiture, still life, landscape painting and sculpture.

Recent landscape paintings have drawn
inspiration from Nordic landscapes, where he has visits to paint. In a 2015
interview, Afshar makes reference to the acutely self-reflective nature of his
work, citing a certain proximity to surrealist techniques of automatic writing.
Layers of lived experience are literally woven into one another here: the
harmony of landscapes scenes occasionally interrupted by handwritten text, the
purity of natural light and form frequently cracked and abstracted in the
filter of the artist’s gaze.

This almost alchemical translation of human
subjectivity onto the canvas carries with it an unavoidable sense of
existential contemplation, calling forth the spirit of work by Giacometti just
as clearly as it references Turner’s elemental aesthetic or Monet’s temporally sequential
series of works. In fact, it seems the decision to paint at intervals
throughout the day corresponds as much here to the documentation of lived
experience as it does the fluctuation of light over a landscape.

The process is key. The heighted sense of openness to
all stimuli, both internal and external, facilitates an ultimately positive spiritually
transformation. That is why I paint and sculpt.

As George Innes writes, "the
true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist's own spiritual nature."